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‘Once Upon A Time’ Season 4 Episode 11 Recap: “Heroes and Villains”

The Snow Queen is gone and so is her curse of Shattered Sight, so all should be well on Once Upon A Time, right? Wrong! This is Storybrooke and there’s always trouble around the corner.

In “Heroes and Villains,” Elsa (Georgina Haig) brings down the wall of ice to reveal the edge of Storybrooke. Anna (Elizabeth Lail) attempts to walk across it, but Emma (Jennifer Morrison) stops here. It seems there is still a bit of the Snow Queen’s magic left and if someone leaves Storybrooke, they can never return.

This leaves Anna, Elsa and Kristoff (Scott Michael Foster) still searching for a way home. After all, they have to get back to Arendelle and stop Hans and his 12 brothers from taking over their kingdom.

With the curse lifted, Regina (Lana Parrilla) returns Marian’s (Christie Laing) heart to her and believes all is well. Regina continues to grapple with her feelings for Robin Hood (Sean Maguire). Marion realizes there’s something between them and tells Regina she doesn’t want to keep Robin if he doesn’t love her.

But fate has other plans. The ice hasn’t completely left Marian’s heart and she is stricken again – this time the ice has reached her heart. Marian will die, but there is one way to save her. If Marian crosses over the Storybrooke town line, where there is now magic, she will be cured.

Regina tells Robin that he can’t send her over by herself. She tells Robin he must go with her and be with his family. At the town line, Marian crosses and is healed. Robin kisses Regina one last time and crosses to re-join his family – Marian and Roland.

After hearing about Anna, Elsa, and Krisoff searching for a portal to go home, Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle) knows he must help. But his help isn’t entirely altruistic. He knows if Anna sees him, she will recognize him and tell everyone his plan to use the Sorcerer’s Hat to cleave himself from the dagger for ultimate power.

With Hook still under his control, Rumpelstiltskin reveals the portal door to Arendelle in the big house he showed Belle after they got married. Hook, with Rumpelstiltskin pulling his strings, tells Emma about the portal.

Emma, Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, Mary Margaret (Ginnifer Goodwin), David (Josh Dallas) and Henry (Jared Gilmore) go to the house and find the door. They all say goodbye and Elsa and Kristoff go through. Before Anna follows, she says she wished she had met this Mr. Gold to thank him — that he must be some kind of good fairy. David sets her straight, and though the audience doesn’t see the whole conversation, it is implied Anna tells the group what Rumpelstiltskin was up to.

As Rumpelstiltskin prepares to enact the spell to rid himself of the dagger that controls him, and promising to kill Hook when he is done, he is interrupted by Emma and Mary Margaret. He freezes them and is finishing the spell, and begins to crush Hook’s heart, but it doesn’t work. He looks over and Belle (Emilie de Ravin) has the dagger, the real one, and commands him to unfreeze Emma and Mary Margaret and drop Hook’s heart.

The “B” plot explains why Belle does what she does at the end of the episode. While Belle was Rumpelstiltskin’s captive in the Enchanted Forest, she was kidnapped. The kidnapper demands a gauntlet that can reveal a person’s weakness. When Rumpelstiltskin arrives, he discovers the captors are the evil trinity of Maleficent (True Blood‘s Kristin Bauer van Straten), Ursula (Merrin Dungey), and Cruella de Vil (Victoria Smurfit). Rumpelstiltskin surprises Belle when he trades the gauntlet for her life.

But did he? Early in the episode, as Henry is cleaning up in Rumpelstiltskin’s shop, he drops items off a shelf and one of them is the gauntlet.

So, after finding out what Rumpelstiltskin was up to and what he did to Hook, Belle forces Rumpelstiltskin to take them to the Storybrooke town line; she has a plan. She forces him to cross the line into the world without magic so he can never return to Storybrooke.

Meanwhile, Henry takes Emma and Regina to a hidden room in the house that contained the portal to Arendelle. It’s a library full of empty storybooks. Henry believes it’s the authors’ house and he can find a way for Regina to write her own happy ending.

Back in Arendelle, we see Anna and Elsa one more time. Hans and his brothers have been defeated and ousted from their kingdom. Though she is sporting a huge bruise on her hand, where she decked Hans, Anna looks stunning in her wedding dress. Anna and Elsa join hands as they head out of the room and take Anna to Kristoff for her wedding.

The ending sets up the next big, long storyline this season: Rumpelstiltskin finds Ursula feeding the fish in an aquarium in New York. He is rallying the troops to go back to his evil ways and head back to Storybrooke. After Ursula agrees, he says they have two more stops before they can get started. The two other stops are to pick up Cruella de Vil and Maleficent.

The latter half of the season will pit Heroes against Villains. Who will win out and which side will Regina fall?